Depleted uranium is uranium which has had the isotopes that are fissionable in an easy manner, unstable that is to say, and as such capable of sustaining a chain reaction removed.. Natural uranium as we would get if extracting and processing ore to yellowcake (not a mere few hobbyists have done it. Some have done it much more responsible than others. I've seen some rather nightmarish videos on youtube at the worst end of the scale perhaps, has to be the bugger that was doing it in by his family swimming pool, drying it with a space heater, saying 'this is fine, I've turned the fan unit off and am heating it only', not exact words, I forget his precise phrasing.But what he was drying, by the pool, was the results of processing large quantities of natural uranium ore he'd hacked out of the ground himself, and refined to yellowcake, and thence, proceeding with concentrating it as much as possible, before intending to isolate the mixed isotopic fraction containing the uranium, and IIRC going for uranium metal. Sloppy safety procedures, shockingly, shockingly so. I would NEVER countenance his behaviour in my own laboratory. This mind you, is my own, privately owned lab, which I have been working on ever since I was a youngish child. My old man was kind and generous enough to not only PERMIT me to have, at before age ten, I forget the exact age I started out with my chemistry and biotech (and to a lesser extent, physics, but mostly the former, plus mycology, which my old man, tells me I started out, as a rank beginner of course, by teaching myself to read using Roger Phillips' textbook, when I presumably must have seen it somewhere and begged my dad for my own copy, because it had lots and lots of microscopy information and some on the use of chemical reagents (I substituted homemade butyl chloral hydrate, aka the sedative-hypnotic drug chlorbutol, occasionally as as preservative also, in making my Melzer's reagent, since at the time I found making chloral hydrate itself too difficult because it requires a photocatalytic reaction, direct chlorination of ethanol using gaseous Cl2. The photocatalysis was the bit that got in my way, since I had no quartz glassware and couldn't of course afford it as a nipper with mere pocket money income, substituted by what I could raise, by stripping as many bunches of blossom off cherry trees as many as could be obtained, and walking round the town I live in selling them door to door for a modest price, ten pence a little sprig, 50 a nice bunch of flowers, a pound coin in request for a really big clump. And of course, I knew even then that because of my age, people would applaud a child's efforts to earn himself a bit of extra pocket money, and they often did, to my calculating mind and child's innocent delight mixed together (oxymoron? no, thats auties for you, I'm Kanner's), by giving me some more than I'd ask for, not reliably every time but a large fraction did indeed calculate my then wee anklebiter-ness and age in the equation, although mind you NOW I know that THEY probably did not see it as an equation. Sometimes if I was VERY lucky I even got a five pound note, once or twice a tenner even, but only a handful of times in my total 'career' as a door-to-door flower sales'man'
What they DIDN'T and could not possibly have had a clue about, was that heard worked for money (I'd do this after returning home from school when the flowers werein season, and I would immediately go out and start stripping the trees, cherry was the species chosen for the chance to get both pink and white both, which went for a higher going rate by list price, and also a higher chance of being given a larger sum than was to be charged as the minimum sum in order to make purchase., and then I would spend until I had to come in at night, going out as late as would be acceptable to call on people I did not know, and canvass every last single door withinthe range I could walk, or when I was given my own bicycle, that I could transport a movable lot per shipment I guess one could call it, and do all the estates and roadsthat I could get to, offload of cargo and return to my stash of flowers to reload and start flogging once again)The bit the kind folks (elderly were especially generous more commonly, sometimes even refusing flowers but giving me a sum of their choosing on their volition just for my trying so hard and being such a good kind kid..)Well I was. but I wanted the money to call on the pharmacies, for peroxide, KMnO4, MgSO4, iodine tincture, clean bicarb not full of garbage like rice flour in the crap sold as baking powder), the beer homebrew store for sodium metabisulfite, garden centers a RICH mine of all sorts, ammonium sulfate for generation of ammonia gas, copper sulfate if I got lucky, a goldmine of chlorate weedkiller that could be cleaned via fractional crystallization to strip out the salt, although I ended up just passing chlorine gas through hot, concentrated aqueous NaOH, from the hardware stores in prilled solid form, ammonia in dilute solution, that I'd then saturate using the garden center sulfate salt. Sulfuric acid drain cleaners, hydrochloric as muriatic acid, sometimes respectably concentrated to 30%, the sulfuric either 93 or 98% dependent upon brand although some has a crappy purple dye in it), car cold weather starting fluid that one sprays into the air intake, thats a mixture of diethyl ether, heptane and diisopropyl ether in some brands, which I'd separate via fractional distillation, the EtOEt comes off first, then the DIPE, then lastly the small portion of heptane, leaving behind a bit of high boiling lubricant muck in the still pot, although one NEVER lets an ether still boil to dryness, for it concentrates any peroxide or hydroperoxides, the exception being dimethyl ether which is a very very volatile, cryogen, gaseous at RT. But didn't know as a kid, didn't have lab manuals, only basic textbooks and lists of chemicals and reactions that I'd get from the local library and just take out and renew and renew and renew until (nobody ever did actually) someone would want the books. The specific book most useful to me I pretty much had on ownership-via-free-loan on a more or less permanent basis and just took it back for stamping every now and then ahahaha)So yeah, I've been at it for a long time, I'm turning thirty in a few days, and its been one long, solid period of living, eating, drinking, occasionally getting high off, well more than occasionally lol, shitting and pretty much everything else-ing chem and biotech. You might well say I'd been, as a kid, obsessed. Well again, I have a license to have been. And I just never stopped being deep into it as a hobby. Spent, and still DO spend every penny that doesn't go to buy food on reagents and glassware. Well, and the odd bag of weed or H, if I want more of the latter than comes as a result of seasonal poppy grows and processing)But god damn, this guy on youtube, look around, he's doing this in his family shed, right beside the pool, spouting on about how he's all safe because he's blocked up the door, closed the windows. Then processing all this refined frickin yellowcake right beside the family pool! Absolutely astonishing how blase and how much, frankly of a poster child for everything bad ever said by chemo-phobic politician bell ends.And I would NEVER, EVER allow that to have taken place using any of my own facilities.But I will say this much. DEPLETED uranium, consists of almost entirely 238U, which is not spontaneously fissionable using slow/thermal neutrons, and cannot be used for an atom bomb. Although it is capable of absorbing a neutron and being transmuted in the right (or in some hands entirely the wrong) procedures, to plutonium, as the long lived and if pure, quite capable of being used by shitheads with bomb aspirations (and yes I include governments in this category. I take interest in the physics, but have no interest in my own physics PACKAGE. Not in the sense of a bomb. Although IMO only the most sophisticated groups of trash would be capable of actually utilizing even 100% pure weapons grade lookie-here-gets-a-gold-star kablooie fuel, the implosion physics required for plutonium based (like the 'fat man' device used against japan, the other one, 'little boy' being a uranium 'gun' type device, basically, on the most primitive explanation level, shooting one correctly shaped piece of uranium, of sub-critical mass into another rightly shaped sub critical mass down what amounts to a cannon with the impact target inside. Whack two subcritical masses together to get a critical mass, spontaneous fission, and boom goes the dynamite. So to speak.Natural uranium has factors working against it however being used for this by all but the sophisticated (read EXTREMELY well funded and damn smart jihadist types who would also have excellent scientists working for them, ex iraqi weapons scientists selling their knowledge on the black market, etc. MAYBE, but again onlya miniscule proportion of natural uranium is fissionable. At least directly, sans isotopic transmutation. Governments or vermin working for them at this aim is another kettle of aquatoids. It consists almost entirely of the stable isotope uranium 238. Some 235U and 233U. 235 is the one sought after for people wanting bloody big fireworks. Its fissionable with neutron bombardment, and also on the compression of a nuclear device's 'pit', once a neutron hits an atom of uranium's fissionable isotopes what happens is that atom will fragment, assuming absorption of the neutron, which must be within the correct energy range. Split apart into two lighter daughter nuclides, whilst emitting a lot of energy, and more neutrons than went into fissioning the initial atom. Now it doesn't take much working out to see what happens in the context of a quantity of atoms, be it a few individual atoms close enough in a hypothetical, pedagogical context to assume 100% efficiency which IRL is NOTHING like the case, only a tiny proportion, IIRC its on the order of grams, for multiple tens of kilogram pits actually undergoes fission the rest gets vaporised by the blast and in some cases transmuted to other elements, the initial discovery, if I remember right, although its been a while since I concentrated on physics, more a chem, bio and in particular toxicology, pharmacology/neuropharmacology and psychopharmacology, medical tech and developments, and natural history (the last often goes with the others, for many, many fascinating, and on the odd occasion, rather awful experiences....cough..accidental anticholinesterase poisoning once....things are to be found in all sorts of natural organisms and even inorganic natural processes) guy really, but also compulsive, knowledge-addict and polymath in general, I take interest in almost everything, bar mathematics, for that is a true struggle for me, being dyscalculic. Odd hobby and interest set you'd say,I cannot disagree with that, hell I think so myself. Being Kanner's (otherwise termed the classic variant, as opposed to aspie, or in girl's, Rett's syndrome, although I only know one of the latter, and she is only the damn smartass she is because shes a chimaera, partial exp
ression of the gene coding for the MECP2 protein that when deleted or even slapped about with, as the protein in particular is very sensitive to levels of exp
ression, too much, too little=trouble. Its embryonic lethal in males with the usual XY karyotype, only survivable in cases of klinefelter's etc. where the karyotype is XXY. My Rett's friend, she got lucky, as it USUALLY disables, non ambulant, nonverbal, severity variable but usually severe mental retardation...this girl bucks the trend in every way more or less...teaches dance to special needs kids, is an absolute genius mentally, very, very intelligent, and with a smartass, smartmouthed razor wit, and if needs be, such as directed against the likes of autism speaks, good god, NOT a girl I'd like to go up against, the tongue lashings she can give to the deserving are a true sight to see. They'd leave not scars, but gouges down to the periosteum, and compound fractures, heavy blood loss. Hell, a tonguewhipping from this lass, hehe, I'd want her with me taking down a bug-filled base, either as a psionic specialist, or just to go in armed with that tongue, never mind a blaster launcher or plasma cannon. I could well see her slicing chryssalids and sectopods, cyberdisks alike to ribbons just with her funny-as-hell sarcasm (yes, I admit, fell for her pretty much the moment we spoke, although we are too far apart for..well. Damn is all I can say...frickin' stunner too. Never mind the shock prods...
)And I think that those tendencies being born and innate to me really, or as close as. Picked up the interests before I could practice the science behind them which was frustrating, but got started very early on. Still am supported by the old man in it all, this year's birthday present was £100, specifically to outfit the lab with equipment, and last year's was a new vacuum pump. Occasionally get things like dessicators, my autoclave, donated to me when he's done with whatever he wanted them for, knowing I will get a lot more out of them than he ever could with them seeing maybe odd use now and then. Whereas my bloody-mindedness and set-on-my-path type-ness is what I think, counters not the difficulty but what might otherwise be offputting for many others. Because I just won't take my dyscalculia telling me 'no you can't, Tsath'' for an answer. No way in hell. Not now, not as a kid, and not ever.And as for natural uranium, from yellowcake, as the metal, its pretty high in counts, although no use to bomb makers, aside from scum that just want to spread fear and panic with so called 'dirty bombs', spreading radiological muck like shit on a farmers field.Depleted uranium on the other hand really isn't that radioactive. Its not NICE, mind you, but you can safely hold it in your hand. At least, as long as one remains aware that it is INCREDIBLY heavy and dense. Tungsten doesn't get a look in. The main hazards with DU, are its effects as a heavy metal (in the toxicological sense, like mercury, lead, cadmium, thallium and other such elements, I'd include arsenic, and it fits, although its not always a metal, depending on the allotrope, and even thenmore often metalloid)DU is primarily a kidney toxicant, although known to build up longterm in bones, as does plutonium, which however does not have a suitably nonradioactive isotope for anymans lower-level citizen chemists to fuck about with, assuming they aren't more interested in the nuclear physics than the chemistry of the element.Low, low level alpha emitter, internally not pleasant, but its not a hot isotope at all really. (238U this applies to, aka depleted uranium)Another nasty thing about it though is trying to machine the stuff. It'll catch fire in fine particles, and shavings are unnerving, during the cutting etc, sawing (FORGET using hand tools, power tool job, so lots of friction lots of heat. Its just too hard, and too dense to make a damn dent in the stuff otherwise. Metal fires are bastardsto deal with. Water is likely to make them worse due to the intense heat splitting it apart into H and O, CO2 can be dangerous with E.g magnesium, lithium, calcium fires that kind of thing and presumably just as much so with uranium. Although I've only ever done anything like that whilst blanketing a piece to be cut with a stream of argon to serve as an inert gas and prevent oxygen coming into contact with the bulk of the metal being tooled.Thats part, along with the density, of the reason its used for kinetic energy penetrators, armor piercing rounds of the high velocity type, because when a sharp slug of DU hits E.g a tank (or alien submarine when used as a penetrator to drill a hole before the explosive charge of the D.U.P head torpedoes launched against the subs follow up, like a tandem charge, in likeness not in the way DUP heads are presented. though) hits the armor plate of a tank, its pyrophoric nature, and hardness, denseness, in punching a hole through the armor, and as it travels, the mechanical shear forces experienced by the round cause it to self-sharpen as it travels through the enemy tank, or whatever other strong, tough, resistant materials, whereas tungsten, the other frequent metal used in kinetic energy penetrator rounds, mushrooms out, like a regular lead bullet against body armor would.And the really nasty thing, lots of fine toxic DU dust aside is it ignites, and cooks the occupants of the tank alive, as well as consuming oxygen. Not pretty, as a weapon. Effective, but downright nasty. I would still love to get my hands on some genuine DU penetrator rods though. No need or want for the actual rounds, or cannons, just the metal staballoy penetrator rods, some for a display piece in an element collection, and some to separate out the other elements and reshape it as E.g things like arc-melted beads, foil, fine powder for exploration in chemistry contexts. Sandwich compounds like uranocene are intriguing. Bet, although this I haven't looked into theres probably a few niche catalysts to be had somewhere. Uranyl nitrate and acetate are available easily enough in quantity, but I SPECIFICALLY do not want natural uranium for this kind of exploration, and IIRC the photochemical supplies are probably natural uranium given the effect of radiaction upon film stock.I forget the name of the thread, one by Sp1ke, I think, about the naming by IUPAC of the transuranics. Possibly were I was suggesting that stuff about rydberg matter and eka-astatine. Aka, provisionally, tennesine. I can't say as I like the name really, it doesn't roll off the tongue like those for the other halogens, which are well thought out and come from their qualities, rather than merely named to honor something. Such as bromine for instance, coming from the ancient greek word 'bromos' meaning 'stench', which is most certainly applicable to bromine, although I do not particularly loathe its smell.So, this is Tsathoggua, and his introduction. He wonders if X-com are hiring in dual combat-science team roles behind the scenes. That would be ideal:D *chuckles*All the better to blow your head off 'mr' sectoid, with my latest off-duty time science project.....
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